H -(sig)"I'm keeping the money, you know. I'm calling it 'Asshole Tax'".
J - No matter how good some lines are it still has a shit ending!
I - You are wrong. And I can't be bothered to explain why.
H - The ending is meant to be funny - hence the comedy knob. How the hell else would it end?
J - With a winner. Either Brad or Ed. FFS.
L - Well Ed did blow half his head off to get rid of brad, so I think he won. BTW, I've just been to see it... it's fucking amazing...
C - Did he? The last scene seemed sort of contradict itself. He put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, which killed Tyler apparently. But when he got up, the wound looked more like he'd been shot in the neck...perhaps he didn't really shoot himself in the head, merely symbolically rather than literally lobotomising himself.
Come to think of it, perhaps none of it was real.. Marla, Project Mayhem, Fight Club... it could all be in his mind. Chris 'Was the gun even real?' McMullen
***
H - But Ed does win. A bit. With a lot of urgent surgery.
J - A bit - what about all those buildings FFS!
L - They are just buildings, man. He destroys his alter-ego, and realises that there was a grain of truth to what brad had been saying..
I - Maybe he doesn't agree with what Brad was doing, but it was too late. See my other reply basically.
L - See this is where I think you are truely missing out on all the endings of Fight club...
The cool thing about it is the fact that every person who sees it will have a different opinion as to weather it was good (sanity triumphing) or evil (chaos)... All you know is what you've been shown... infact you can't even be sure of that :-)
Its a wonderful metaphor for mind-altering drugs, but did you notice there was not one reference to anything other than a little alcohol?
***
H - I have no idea *why* I like the ending. It could even be plain hysteria by then.
I - Well the point of the movie is that he has gone mad, so at the end he has realised what he has been doing and what it has come of it. The film doesn't tell you what he does from then. You can believe whatever you want about what will become next.
H - That's a very daring thing for a director to just leave it open.
I - And that could not possibly be the case cause the rest of the film is a fine example of conforming to the socially acceptable rules.
H - It would be a really dull action-film ending, and make it like 'armageddon' where they never know when to stop.
I - My point exactly.
I - Hopefully he kind of cures himself, the buildings are destroyed because the alternative is to disconnect them all which would getting into another stereotypical final action scene with the whole good/bad ending depending on whether they can stop the building's from being destroyed or not.
I - And that is not the point of the movie, the movie is above that, it's concerned with the bloke, and him seeing that he was mad. We have already seen what he is capable of.
H - So once he's been as mad as possible, the film can stop as its work is done?
I - He's gone mad. He can do some fucked up shit when he is mad. He has realised he's been mad. He has done some fucked up shit to stop his madness. The film has nothing to say, otherwise it would become a melodrama about recovery and "Regarding Henry" was on telly last week anyway.